Amazing Bridge in France: the Millau Viaduct

I was checking MSNBC tonight when I saw a link to the "Worlds Most Amazing Bridges." OK, fair enough, I thought. It turned out to be an awesome collection of bridges, selected for a variety of qualities. One of the bridges stood out for its raw dimensions, however: The Millau Viaduct near Millau France (southern France, near Spain). Image by facemepls at Flickr (creative commons) Check out the dimensions:

This breathtaking cable-stayed bridge, completed in 2004, is the tallest vehicular bridge in the world. It spans the valley of the Tarn River near Millau in France, with a total length of 8,071 feet. Its maximum height soars to 1,130 feet. This colossus was engineered by Michel Virlogeux and designed by Norman Foster. At 890 feet, its road bridge deck is the highest in the world; drivers have said it feels like sailing through a cloud.

arch-at-sunset To put this incredible bridge in perspective, we have a spectacular monument in St. Louis. Our 630 foot tall Gateway Arch is often described as even "soaring." See insert. Now consider that the road deck of the Millau Viaduct is 260 feet taller than the Gateway Arch and that it runs for more than 1 1/2 miles. Consider, too, that the tallest towers of the bridge (1,130 feet) are taller than the Eiffel Tower (986 ft) and almost as tall as the Empire State Building (1250 feet). millau-viaduct-phillipc For more spectacular views, check out the website of the architechts, Foster + Partners, where you'll learn that the For more spectacular views, check out the website of the architechts, Foster + Partners, where you'll learn that the Millau Viaduct "connects the motorway networks of France and Spain, opening up a direct route from Paris to Barcelona. The bridge crosses the River Tarn, which runs through a spectacular gorge between two high plateaux."

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Beautiful self-organized pattern: the huge hexagon at Saturn’s north pole

Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:

This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.

“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask.  No one built it.  It’s a self-organized pattern.  And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.

This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.

But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe.  In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:

Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped

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Continue ReadingBeautiful self-organized pattern: the huge hexagon at Saturn’s north pole